Novel word learning by Spanish-speaking preschoolers

Cues are present in communication interactions which help children to learn that new words may refer to whole objects, object parts, actions, characteristics, or the relationships between other words. This study explored the extent to which Spanish-speaking 3-year-old children used object bias and morphosyntactic bootstrapping as cues to constrain the meaning of new words presented with a novel action and object scene. Upon hearing a word for the first time children may assume that it refers to a whole object, or children may rely on morphosyntactic information such as definite articles and direct object clitics to indicate that new words are either nouns or verbs. The results of this study indicated that by 3 years of age Spanish-speaking children do not assume that novel words refer to whole objects; rather action responses were more prevalent. Additionally, while children did not use definite articles and direct object clitics as morphosyntactic cues to interpret the referents of new words as actions or objects, the accuracy with which they mapped new words to targeted scenes did vary with the grammatical morphemes presented.Communication Sciences and Disorder